Teenage Lexicon

There are two reasons I didn't post this week. 1. I went on vacation with my cousins. It was amazing. 2. I sent some stuff to an agent. My heart is still pounding. I'm going to post this week's Book of the Week and Dialogue Diaries within the next few days. Everyone, wish me luck.

One of the things in writing that I'm actually good at is dialogue. Through lots of practice, discussion, and hair-pulling-outing, I've come up with lots of tips and methods for writing dialogue.  Something that happens a lot in books—especially YA and upper-middle grade—is inaccuracy or unrealism. Sometimes characters will say things to each other that people just don’t say to each other in real life.  Like, how many times in real life do you hear people say things like, “Come on, everyone, we have to put the sword back in the cave by midnight or else the world will explode!” Dialogue has to feel real to readers, or else it’s ineffective.  Here’s an example from a very, very early draft of my book, The Knowers : “Can you stop skipping already? It’s annoying.” “Oh. Sorry.” I try to make my walking more methodical, but the day is just so beautiful. We’re no longer at the mercy of the bus. Our little brothers are ahead of us, racing each other. They...

Hi, everyone (though I doubt anyone's gonna read this)! I'm Nina. I'm a writer. This is off to a great start, isn't it? One day, I'm going to be a famous author and people are going to stalk my blog and come back and find this post and think, "Maybe she's not that great, anyway." Anyway, I wrote a book called The Knowers. It's actually not that bad. I'm hoping that it'll be published one day. As of now, I've sent countless queries (not countless, more like twenty-two). I haven't gotten any offers yet, but I've gotten some amazing advice from some very sweet people. The Knowers is about these super smart kids. Really, I could try to explain it, but it would sound so marginalizing. Basically, a group of super smart people live underground and try to solve the world's problems, but they actually end up creating a lot of them. The story follows Skylar, a new Knower, who has absolutely no idea what's going on. I...